Showing results by author "Alan Watts"

With Out of Your Mind: Essential Listening from the Alan Watts Audio Archives, you are invited to immerse yourself in 12 of this legendary thinker's pinnacle teaching sessions about how to break through the limits of the rational mind and begin expanding your awareness and appreciation for the Great Game unfolding all around us.

Alan W. Watts' "message for an age of anxiety" is as powerful today as it was when this modern classic was first published. We spend too much time trying to anticipate and plan for the future, too much time lamenting the past. We often miss the pleasures of the moment in our anxious efforts to ensure the next moment is as enjoyable. Drawing from Eastern philosophy and religion, Watts argues that it is only by acknowledging what we do not and cannot know that we can find something truly worth knowing.

Life is the ultimate game of hide and seek... and the good news is that you're it! With the combination of playful irreverence and penetrating insight that made him a legend in Western philosophy, Alan Watts investigates the surprisingly liberating concept of "the universe as play" found at the heart of Hinduism, Zen, and other wisdom traditions.

Macmillan Audio presents In My Own Way, Alan Watts' acclaimed autobiography, published for the first time in audio.  

Discover how the understanding and practice of Zen can bring peace and enlightenment into your daily life in this classic work. Narrated by Sean Runnette, this audio program presents Alan Watts's classic bestseller, introducing Western listeners to Zen Buddhism and elaborating on the key concepts including: The history of Zen, the principles and practice of Zen, the tradition of Za-Zen (meditation) and the Koan, and the integration of Zen into every aspect of life. The Way of Zen presents an understandable, inspirational, and spiritually rewarding exploration of Zen Buddhism.

"If you were God," asked Alan Watts, "what kind of universe would you create? A perfect one free of suffering and drama? Or one filled with surprise and delight?" With Just So, the celebrated philosopher and self-described "spiritual entertainer" invites us to explore the hidden dimensions that shape both the cosmos and our personal experience of it.

Modern Western culture and technology is inextricably tied to the belief in the existence of a self as a separate ego, separated from and in conflict with the rest of the world. In this classic book, Watts provides a lucid and simple presentation of an alternative view based on Hindu and Vedantic philosophy.

Deep down, most people think that happiness comes from having or doing something. Here, in Alan Watts’s groundbreaking third book (originally published in 1940), he offers a more challenging thesis: authentic happiness comes from embracing life as a whole in all its contradictions and paradoxes, an attitude that Watts calls the “way of acceptance.” Drawing on Eastern philosophy, Western mysticism, and analytic psychology, Watts demonstrates that happiness comes from accepting both the outer world around us and the inner world inside us,

Mark Watts compiled this work from his father's extensive journals and audiotapes of famous lectures he delivered, in his later years, across the country. In three parts Alan Watts explains the basic philosophy of meditation, how individuals can practice a variety of meditations, and how inner wisdom grows naturally.

Alan Watts discusses the fundamental attitudes that run through all religions or "ways of liberation," as the Far Eastern disciplines might better be described. By following these practices to the extremes of repentance, rebellion, and resignation, one may be freed from the endless cycles of reincarnation which perpetuate the human condition.

Alan Watts examines the problem of humans in a seemingly hostile universe in ways that question the social norms and illusions that bind and constrict modern humans. Marking a groundbreaking synthesis, Watts asserts that the powerful insights of Freud and Jung, which had, indeed, brought psychiatry close to the edge of liberation, could, if melded with the hitherto secret wisdom of the Eastern traditions, free people from their battles with the self.

With essays on "cosmic consciousness" (including Alan Watts' account of his own ventures into this inward realm); the paradoxes of self-consciousness; LSD and consciousness; and the false opposition of spirit and matter, This Is It: And Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience is a truly mind-opening audiobook collection. 

Have you ever seen an inch or touched an hour? In The Holographic Web, Alan Watts reveals how our idea of the "self" is no more than these abstract concepts - and how to untrain ourselves from thier limitations. Join this self-proclaimed "spiritual entertainer" for an intriguing investigation of the nature of consciousness.

Space is considered to be nothingness by many. But after all it is the background in which we see everything. It is against space and within the dimension of time that we experience everything we experience. Space and time are the two basic dimensions of our world but are uncommonly illusive. We can say they are our way of thinking of the universe as being a system of patterns. And our awe at the vastness of space may be man's astonishment at himself.

Discover how the understanding and practice of Zen can bring peace and enlightenment into your daily life in this classic work. Narrated by Ralph Blum, this audio program presents readings of carefully chosen selections from Alan Watts's classic best seller, illuminated by rare recordings of the author personally commenting and elaborating on the key concepts and ideas of his seminal work.

Alan Watts discusses the Indian philosophy of the world as maya - under its multiple meanings as illusion, art, magic, creative power, measure, etc. Various techniques in the arts are used to illustrate the delicate and vibrational character of the material world, and to suggest a new approach to the old philosophy that the universe is "mind" only.

Drawn from hundreds of hours of rare archival recordings from the personal collection of his son, Mark Watts, this program presents the essential message of Alan Watts. Here is Alan Watts, recorded live in seminars conducted in America and Japan, personally explaining how the Eastern view of man and his place in the world can be made meaningful to the contemporary Westerner.

Alan Watts has become known as the West's foremost interpreter of Eastern thought, and one of the most original philosophers of this century. Fortunately for us, he is also witty, articulate, insightful, very entertaining, and a pleasure to listen to. More from Watts.

Alan Watts discusses the word tathata, which is translated from the Sanskrit as "suchness" or "thusness." The term is used in Mahayana Buddhism to suggest how things look to a Buddha, to one who has experienced enlightenment or liberation and is, therefore, called a Tathagata - one who comes (and goes) thus. Watts shares the sense of this nonsense in Buddhist philosophy, and its practical demonstration in Zen.

Alan Watts became famous first as a brilliant intellectual and then as a serious student of Buddhism and meditation. In the 1970s, the last years of his life, he retreated to a small, isolated cabin deep in the woods. He meditated every morning and then wrote. Still the Mind consists of several talks he gave in his later years, recorded and edited by his son, Mark Watts, and then published as a book. His speaking shows a maturity and wisdom that can only come after years of meditation.